Shadid took copious notes but these are, writes Hicks, “barely decipherable.” Knowing that Shadid would have wanted some “record of this final trip,” Hicks has written about their week in Syria, meeting rebel fighters in Idlib province in northern Syria near the Turkish border:

The Free Syrian Army is much more organized than the rebel fighters in Libya. Because of the growing number of defectors, there’s a stock of able, trained soldiers and officers mounting in Syria. As the attack on the tanks showed, they don’t yet have the weapons to put up a realistic fight.

Some activists asked to tape an interview with Shadid, just hours before he died. Noting that these are the “last images” of Shadid, Hicks quotes from the interview:

“Do you expect the regime will fall?” the interviewer asked [Shadid].

“I think it will,” he said. “But I think it will take a long time.”

Shadid’s death on February 16 was tragic as is the chance to read his reporting about a conflict that is approaching its one-year anniversary this month.

Sunday Times photographer Paul Conroy, who was wounded in the attack on a media center in Homs that took the lives of foreign correspondent Marie Colvin and photographer René Ochlik, has given his first interview describing how he was smuggled out of the bombarded city via motorbike. He describes what is going on in Syria now as an “indiscriminate massacre of men, women and children” that is comparable to the 1990 killings in Bosnia and Rwanda.

The Syrian government has continued to bar a Red Cross convoy from entering the battered Bab Amr district of Homs, four days after FSA troops withdrew. Activists report that the district is now all but “deserted.” The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) says that it has brought aid to a “considerable” number of families who have fled Bab Amr and are now in the nearby village of Abel. The ICRC also says that up to 2,000 people are fleeing Syria to cross the border into northern Lebanon; some 7,000 Syrian refugees have already registered with the United Nations Human Rights Committee in Lebanon.

Activists report that the Syrian army has been shelling other areas, including the al-Quosoor neighbourhood of northern Homs, where a number of large demonstrations were held during the siege of Bab Amr, and the city of Rastan norther of Homs, where the activist Local Coordinating Committee reports that five children have been killed.

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Frontline did an episode on Syria at the end of this last year and Shadid had some very poignant things to say about what was going on. I honestly did not put two and two together on his death until after watching that episode. It is WELL worth a watch!

For goodness sake, Robert O. Why is al-Assad a madman for doing what any government in the world would do, that is, resist a an externally financed and directed rebellion against his legitimate government?